The best part of the hockey season begins tonight—yet we are on the outside looking in.
It is a most unfortunate place to be.
It must be different in a place such as Columbus, where there have been no playoffs, and hockey isn’t all over your television, and you don’t have a fantasy playoff draft, and you have to never think about what game is being shown on any given night.
But this is Hockey Country—and this is a market that lives, dies and emotes on a far too personal basis about everything that is Maple Leafs. And by not being good enough to make the playoffs, it isn’t only that Leafs fans aren’t always certain where to turn, it’s that they have been essentially robbed of the opportunity to be part of hockey at its very best.

So why, apart from their recent pattern of stumbling in the early playoff rounds, is there so little love for the Red Wings?
Kirk Maltby, who has played for Detroit since 1996, doesn’t know for sure, but he’s heard the doom-and-gloom naysayers.
“It’s funny, we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago,” Maltby said.
“I have XM radio in my truck and I listen to it all the time. At the beginning of the year, you had all these people calling in, trying to make predictions. People were saying we would be sixth or eighth — make the playoffs, but just slide in and then don’t do too much damage at all.
“I was kind of shaking my head….”

“It looks like [Wade] Dubielewicz will keep playing,” Nolan said after the team practiced. “More than likely (it will be Dubielewicz). Ricky’s not in our thought pattern right now.”
That would change should DiPietro stay symptom-free and pass a neurological test, which could happen as soon as tomorrow. If that did occur, he still would need practice time before returning to game action.
“Rick’s trying to get back, but all our whole focus has to be on the guys we have,” Nolan said.

Do the Devils have that extra gear on offence? Can Lou Lamoreillo’s squad kick it up a notch? I think the new coach is concerned about it, and that’s why he decided to go behind the bench.
The Tampa Bay Lightning, by contrast, does have that extra gear. This series is going to be a lot closer than people think because of Tampa’s extra jump up front.

He is only 23 years old, but feels almost elderly when talking about Sidney Crosby, the 19-year-old star he will face tonight when Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins visit Spezza’s Ottawa Senators in the first game of the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Both were child prodigies in a game in which the majority of Canadian parents would rather see their sons play a single exhibition game in the National Hockey League than become prime minister.
Both were being written up in major newspapers by ages 13 and 14, Spezza making a quick leap from peewee hockey in Mississauga to bantam and, at 15, off to the major-junior leagues.

If the Stanley Cup playoffs are anything like the just concluded regular season, hockey fans are in for a treat. Despite some persistent problems — an epidemic of head injuries from legal but malicious checks, a pro-fighting backlash against new rules designed to reduce violence and lagging attendance in several cities — the hallmark of the 2006-7 season has been an abundance of beautiful, creative goal-scoring.
Buffalo and Detroit have scored those beautiful goals most often, the main reason they finished first in their conferences and are the favorites to win the Stanley Cup. Many of the Sabres’ goals have come from gorgeous clockwork passing on full-tilt rushes to the net, reminiscent of the great Soviet teams of the 1970s. Many of the Red Wings’ goals have come from precision combination play in tight spaces, an ingenious game of high-speed tic-tac-toe.

I’d like to apologize for making you all wait so very long. I know you’ve been anxious, your families have been tip-tapping their feet, waiting. Your neighbors have been asking you, “has that Sailor told you with great accuracy who is going to win every first-round series of the 2007 Stanley Cup Playoffs? Is he sober?”

Yes. Yes I am and yes I will. Now look. I make no guarantees that the playoffs are going to turn out this way, that the predictions I’m about to offer you are something you should bet your donut money on.

But they are. I am, and I’ve tried to tell you all this many times, very frigging smart. You should listen to me more. You should be asking me for advice on things other than hockey. You don’t, but you should.

“No shootouts, right?” Selanne said, smiling.
Ding-ding!The Ducks were 4-10 in shootouts in the regular season, probably the only thing that prevented them from skating off with the Presidents Trophy for best overall record in the NHL.
Their second weakness was a little more subtle — playing down to the level of their competition, as they did on several occasions during the best season in franchise history.
That, however, can’t happen anymore.
“Exactly,” Selanne said after Monday’s practice at Honda Center. “There are seven teams with over 100 points in our conference, so there are no easy games anymore.”

Back in 1997 I met a guy from there, from Paw Paw, WV. Believe me when I tell you he was pure redneck. He fit all the stereotypes: the NASCAR thing, the Copenhagen thing, the slow drawl and you got the immediate sense that he was loyal to the core. When I met him I seriously doubt he’d ever watched a minute of hockey.

He’d ridden subs, done things he’d never be able to tell me about, toyed with nations in ways Tom Clancy couldn’t imagine, but never watched hockey. Until I forced him to sit down and watch Game 1 of the WCF, Detroit and Colorado. He saw the intensity, the importance of every shift, the way Detroit kept peppering Patrick Roy, only to see him turn them away again and again. After the first period, he was hooked. Hockey had him and we had ourselves a convert.

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